The Instrument and the Atmosphere

Ultima closes at Factory Tøyen with two artists and two distinct approaches to electronic sound. Svetlana Maraš’ grain and glitches and Carmen Villain’s deep basses follow you out.

Svetlana Maraš treats electronic sound as matter under pressure: granular, restless, and alive. Carmen Villain lets it drift into resonance and suspended time. A former factory building in a neighbourhood alive with youth, movement and urban friction, Factory Tøyen is a fitting setting: the memory of making things becomes, for one evening, a space for a different kind of making.

Maraš plays The Instrument, an electronic setup developed over many years of solo work: an evolving configuration of devices, controllers and sound processes that she activates live. Tiny fragments form the starting point: clicks, grains, glitches, sine waves and voice recordings. She tweaks and stretches them, pulling the sound back towards the physical, until you feel you could almost touch it.

Carmen Villain builds her music from samples, loops, field recordings, electronics and fragments of acoustic sound. Moving through ambient, dub and fourth world traditions, she opens them into something broader and more environmental. Bass is central: deep and saturated, felt in the body as much as heard. Around it, sounds drift and dissolve. This is music you do not so much confront as enter.

Ultima’s final concert is not a full stop. Maraš and Villain invite us to stay a little longer with sound itself: its grain, its resonance, its atmosphere.

Want to know more?

• Svetlana Maraš’s years at the Electronic Studio at Radio Belgrade, where she worked with the EMS Synthi 100, have shaped a practice in which the studio is not only a place for recording, but a live system for playing, transforming and destabilising electronic sound.
• In The Quietus, Maraš describes the organic quality she seeks in digital sound and the unruly methods she uses to create it: “I love creating from scratch, completely digital sounds that seem organic, like a field recording almost. There is no such thing as elegance or subtlety in the way I use software.”
• In Carmen Villain’s music, dub is less a genre label than a way of shaping space through bass, rhythm, echo and delay.
• The term “fourth world” is associated with Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, and suggests a hybrid sound world where acoustic instruments, electronic processing and global musical echoes meet.